When lemons are being packed in boxes in certain current installations, the lemons are fed along a broad conveyor belt, and are often packed into the usual two compartment rectangular citrus boxes by manual labor. While a number of proposals have been made to mechanize this process, none have been widely accepted up to the present time. One of the problems involves the fact that lemons and other fruit are irregular in size and shape. Thus, even after grading for the size of the diameter, the variations in the length of the fruit may be significant, so that more counting of the fruit will not provide uniform packing of the boxes.
Accordingly an important object of the present invention is to provide a simple apparatus for automatically loading fragile products, such as fruit, into containers such as boxes, with the containers being filled evenly and uniformly and with no damage to the product.
In addition, the normal simple volumetric measurement of product tends to be quite inaccurate, resulting in large variations in the filling of product containers.
It is, therefore, another object of the invention to improve the accuracy of measurement of product which is being transferred.